


no soft lights

by couldaughter



Series: author's choice [11]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sentinels & Guides, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Backstory, Dreamsharing, Fluff and Angst, Getting Together, M/M, USNTDP
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-07
Updated: 2017-06-07
Packaged: 2018-11-10 14:14:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11128524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/couldaughter/pseuds/couldaughter
Summary: “Glad you could make it, Bob,” he said. “This is Nick. He was pretty cagey when I asked if you knew each other?”“We have never met before,” said Sergei, carefully, still grinning. “But I think we know each other, yes.”





	no soft lights

When Nick was five years old, small and gap toothed and generally adorable, he took a puck to the jaw and ended up in the emergency room. Dad was on the West Coast road trip, so the phone call home had gone to mom, who showed up looking frantic and drove him to the hospital at just a touch over the legal limit.

He spent most of the wait in the ER curled up in the hard plastic chair, forehead to knees, whimpering quietly. There was a weird, awful feeling spreading out from his brain and down, out through all his limbs to the tips of his toes.

“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” Mom asked that, he remembered, with one hand cradling his neck and the other gentle against his shin.

He pressed his head harder against his knees, shook it back and forth. “It _hurts_ , mom.” His voice was slurred, jaw a sharp ache, at war with everything else inside his skin. The medic at the rink had been pretty sure it wasn’t broken, but a fracture was still on the table.

“I know, baby,” she said, not really understanding. “The doctors are gonna fix you up just fine though, don’t you worry.” She kissed him on the forehead, still gentle, and looked anxiously towards the nurse’s desk.

Miserable, he listed sideways until she had one arm curled around him, palm gently stroking his shoulder. She kept it up the whole time they were waiting, another hour and change before a slot freed up for them. It was soothing, gave Nick something else to focus on besides the pain radiating through his bones. He wondered, abstractly, if he was dying.

“Now,” the doctor said, crouching down so he was level with Nick, sat on the examination table listlessly kicking his legs back and forth. “What seems to be the problem?”

Nick looked to his mom, who briefly explained the hockey stuff, and then, haltingly, added his whole new problem she didn’t know about. “My face really hurts but also my, uh, my head and my arms and everything.” Completely against his will, he started to cry, hot tears dripping onto his jersey. He hadn’t wanted to take it off, bloodstains or not. “I wanna stop that, can you stop it? It _really_ hurts, mom.”

His mom looked at him with a look he was about fifteen years too young to recognise. Later on, he’d look back and realise she was afraid for him. Go figure.

“Hmm,” the doctor said, straightening up again. “Sounds like an activation,” he continued, quietly, to mom.

“What’s that?” Nick asked, curiosity overriding the pain. Any time a grownup said something they didn’t want him to hear it made him about ten times more interested in hearing it.

“Well, sweetie,” mom said, resting a careful hand on the top of his head, running her fingers through his hair. “It means you’re even more special than I thought.”

They went home that day with mom’s handbag full of pamphlets, painkillers for Nick’s jaw (which was just bruised, in the end), and empathy suppressants in a shiny bottle that Nick couldn’t stop rolling in his hands. It sounded like the maracas they’d played with in class the week before, all shaky and fun. Mom drove with an almost obsessive attention, eyes glued to the road.

“Honey,” she said, about halfway home, a crease forming on her forehead. “Could you put that down just for a second?”

She sounded perfectly happy, but Nick was getting big enough to recognise when a grownup really wanted him to _listen_ , so he put the bottle down and didn’t pick it up until the morning, when he had to take one of the pills. It made him feel sort of floaty, in a way he didn’t like.

“You’ll get used to it, kid,” said dad, squeezing his shoulder. “Sometimes medicine makes you feel bad for a little bit, but it’s way better than not taking it.”

Nick, on principle, believed him.

Mom and dad dealt with telling school, registering him with the government, and all the other boring stuff he sometimes heard them whispering about when he crept, silently, to peek through the banisters, past his bedtime. He didn’t sleep that well for a while, a side effect of the medication, and ended up with semi-permanent raccoon eyes and a decent knowledge of every creaky floorboard in the house.

Sometimes, when dad was away for a game and mom was up late working, she’d find him on the stairs and get him a midnight snack, cookies or yoghurt, and tuck him back in. He usually slept better afterwards, a blanket of calm on top of his real comforter.

It was difficult, being around the other kids at school and not getting to tell them about the pills he had to take, or why his headaches got so bad, or a thousand other things about his “situation”, but he could manage it alright.

He got really good at being friendly without really making any friends; it was lonely, sometimes, but he had Marcus and Cara and Lisa, so it wasn’t too bad. He couldn’t risking getting too close, wore long sleeves every day even during a third grade heatwave.

Skin contact was still pretty dicey, even with the pills.

His first evaluation came on the tail-end of fifth grade, the day after his 11th birthday. Mom baked a Ninja Turtles cake, and half his class came round to the house to eat it and have a massive, furniture-threatening water balloon battle. The Halloween decorations were up, of course, and he got to take Marcus trick-or-treating on their own for the first time.

He got a sugar headache from eating half the candy that night, but mom and dad didn’t even get mad.

The next day, early enough that the sky was still dark, mom bundled him into a couple of layers of warm clothes and driven him the 50 mile trek to the closest Guide clinic.

“Mom, you’re hurting me,” Nick said quietly, pained, in the waiting room. Mom had a death grip on his hand, a blank expression on her face.

She blinked, looking down at him with an attempt at a smile. “Sorry, sweetheart,” she said, loosening her grip. “I guess I’m a little worried.” She laughed. The echo died quickly, muffled by the egg carton pattern on the walls.

Nick patted her on the arm, feeling a foreign twinge of unease in the back of his head. “Don’t worry, mom,” he said, as the receptionist called his name. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Mom didn’t reply. There was a flash of something horrible on her face, something Nick couldn’t decipher before he was being hustled down the corridor, out of sight.

His memory got sort of fuzzy, after that. There were needles, and electrodes, and -

He had a vivid image, a still image, preserved like an oil painting in his mind - the table, in the middle of the room, metal and cold, with leather straps secured where his wrists and ankles were going to rest.

The few times Nick dwelt on it, in the middle of the night, or in the seconds after an injury, feeling everything at once, he could remember the fear that curdled in his stomach.

Sometimes he was pretty sure it was still there, the same fear eating away at him from the inside out.

 

* * *

 

By the time Nick hit eighth grade, he was almost fully off his suppressants and fully into learning how to live life when someone else falling over could give you concussion symptoms.

He’d been dealing with medication long enough for the pills the doctor prescribed to deal with the empathic overload to change dosage a few times and then, gradually, disappear from his bedroom dresser altogether. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it, appropriately, but he knew he wouldn’t miss the odd, floaty feeling he’d got every few dozen pills.

“You’ve got to deal with them on your own eventually,” the doctor told him, just as he finished elementary. He shot up like a weed halfway through sixth grade - his skating went to shit for a couple of months, until he got his feet back under him. “You’re growing up fast. Before you know it, you’ll be getting your first assignment.”

Nick, not really understanding, just nodded. He needed to get to practice, anyway, dad waiting outside in the car. He never said anything when Nick’s appointments ran long, but it wasn’t like he could wait all day - he had to coach the team as well as drive Nick to the rink, after all.

At the dinner table, the night before he started junior high, mom and dad made him promise not to tell anyone.

“They won’t understand, sweetie,” mom said, reaching across to grab his hand. “I know it’s difficult for you, keeping it all under wraps, but…” She trailed off.

“What your mom is trying to say, Nick,” said dad, from the head of the table. The light cast a weird shadow across his face, made Nick shiver a little. “Is that when we were young, Guides didn’t get treated all that well. It’s supposed to be different now, but you know how cruel kids your age can be. Just look at how those boys treated Marcus for getting braces.”

Nick remembered that vividly. He’d almost gotten suspended for breaking one kid’s nose. “But… Marcus is gonna get his braces off someday. What happens to me?”

Dad shook his head. “You’re a tough kid, Nick. You’ll figure it out.” He and mom shared a look Nick couldn’t decipher. “Let us know if anyone tries to start anything, alright? I may not be an enforcer but I can kick some kid’s ass pretty easy.”

“Mike!” Mom hit him on the arm; she was laughing, though, and the growing tension around the dinner table broke.

Marcus leaned across to Nick, over his plate of spaghetti. “Am I gonna have to start kickboxing or something?”

Nick grinned. “I can take care of myself, squirt.”

Marcus shoved him, grinning back.

So Nick made his way through junior high, kept his thoughts on schoolwork and practice and not much else, and by the time he turned fifteen he thought he had a pretty good lid on the whole Guide thing. He got an empathic workout just walking past the lockers to get to math class, half the school apparently in the middle of some breakup or argument or nervous breakdown.

He had bad days, obviously. On a particularly bad day, in practice, a teammate took a puck to the ankle and cried out loud enough that Nick both heard it and _felt_ it, deep in the back of his brain. He’d hurried over before he could think whether it was a bad idea, stretched out a comforting hand.

He found out later on, from one of the few teammates who’d bothered to come visit him, that he’d screamed and collapsed, right on the ice. Nick could remember, faintly, the shock of pain in his leg, sudden and cold and awful, before he blacked out.

Most of the team kind of ignored him outside of practice, after that, gave him a wide berth in the school corridors. None of them, thankfully, told anybody about it. Nick wasn’t sure what the school bullies might do to him, but his parents seemed very worried about the possibilities.

He ended up laid up with a migraine and a swollen ankle, stuck in bed for three days. It was uncommonly painful, considering there was nothing wrong with his leg. His teammate was only out for two, the sprain apparently a lot less serious than it had looked when he first went down.

That level of transference wasn’t common, apparently, so after the swelling had gone down he’d been stuck back in the evaluation room, restraints fully operational.

He didn’t like to think about it.

That had been in eighth grade, and since then he’d kept a much better lid on it. It was hard, of course, required more concentration than most eighth graders are usually capable of, but that was fine. He made sure not to touch anybody, pulled his sleeves down over his hands, worried at his nails with his teeth. The doctor had said he’d grow up faster than everyone, anyway, and it was good practice for hockey, keeping his emotions in check.

The night before starting senior high, Nick went to bed in high spirits. As a last minute summer treat, dad had taken him and Cara to see Freddy vs Jason at the multiplex; it was fun, eating popcorn and struggling to figure out what the hell was going on. Dad had sworn them to secrecy, beforehand, and Cara had got really into the spy angle - stealthing along the row of mostly-empty seats, keeping one eye on the usher while dad handed over the tickets.

“You know, Mission Impossible came out, like, six years ago, sis,” whispered Nick when she finally got to her seat. “I expect more theatre from you.”

Cara mimed taking off a motorcycle helmet, shook out her shoulder length hair. “I don’t need a _man’s_ approval, bro,” she laughed, patting him on the arm. He felt her happiness trickle over his bicep, a tingle in his fingers. He grinned.

So it was a good evening, and they got home late enough that dad sent them straight up to bed.

Nick got ready for bed quickly, lay down under his faded TMNT sheets, and closed his eyes. He was excited about school - he almost had a handle on his empathy, had gone a few months without a bad episode or snide comment, and he thought maybe he could finally let his guard down enough to try making a couple of friends.

His old teammate, the one who’d sprained his ankle at the rink, still wouldn’t look at him three years later, but Nick was confident he could figure something out. He was good at hiding parts of himself - the Guide thing, as well as some other, more shaded feelings he tried not to think about.

There was something else, thrumming under his skin, that was harder to identify. It was a little bit like the excitement, but also a little like the feeling he sometimes got late at night, in the dark, an anticipation of god-knows-what. That was usually a bad sign, in his experience.

The last time he’d got it it’d turned out Lisa had the flu, and the whole house had been sick for a week.

It took him a while to fall asleep, visions of chicken noodle soup dancing menacingly before his eyes.

He woke up, sometime later, with the fading memory of black and white fur stuck at the front of his mind and a persistent shiver in his hands. It was, he noted absently, a perfectly comfortable night in early September, and there was no reason for the shiver in his hands - which rapidly developed into a shiver in his arms and chest.

Sitting up, he pushed his blanket off his legs and pulled it up to wrap around his shoulders, knees to his chest.

As he reached out to flick on the lamp, bathing the room in a faint golden glow and star shaped shadows across the ceiling, he noticed the melting pattern on his arm. It was odd, like a magic eye pattern, refusing to resolve into anything he recognised, a mess of black ink shifting moment-to-moment.

Now that he’d noticed it, as if it could sense his realisation, his arm started to hurt, freezing cold alternating with stabbing heat; the shivering got worse, second by second.

Not wanting to wake up Marcus, asleep in the room next door, or his sisters down the hall, Nick pulled a fleece around his shoulders and padded down the hall to his parents’ room, feeling a whine building in the back of his throat the whole time. It _hurt_. He could feel, at the edge of his awareness, the pleasant yellow happiness of whatever Marcus was dreaming.

He knocked on the door, called softly, “Mom? Dad?”

It took a few seconds for a response, a kind of beckoning groan Nick remembered from the few times he’d had a bad dream in elementary. He’d had some in middle school as well, but he’d felt a little old to go crawling into his parents’ bed.

He crept in, trying not to let the door creep. Dad had turned on his bedside lamp, bathing the room in a soothing golden glow, and pushed himself up on his elbows. “What’s up, kid?” His voice croaked.

Mutely, Nick held out his arm. The mark was still shifting, still causing that ice cold feeling. The burning sensation had mostly stopped, thankfully.

Dad sat up a little straighter, shook mom’s shoulder. “Honey?” He said, softly. “You oughta see this.”

Nick stayed there, for the first time since he was about eight, and only went back to his own bedroom at around five, giving in to the teen embarrassment preventing him from _actually_ sleeping in his parents’ bed.

In the morning, in the light of day, the mark was fully settled. It was kind of beautiful, three links of a chain with a floral pattern, and a word in an elegant script Nick couldn’t decipher. He spent a good few minutes squinting at it before deciding that, whatever it said, it definitely wasn’t in English.

“Here, Nick,” said mom at breakfast, handing him a sweatband with an anxious smile. “Just for today, alright? We’ll look for something cool tonight, after school.”

Nick took it. “Uh, thanks, mom,” he said, pulling it up over his forearm. It made his chest feel tight, covering it up, a second layer under his cardigan, but he got why mom did it. There’d been a news story, the week before, about some high school kid who got his mark sliced in half by a classmate.

Weird religious nutjob, apparently. Nick had been trying not to think about it with the kind of focus he usually reserved for practice. It was definitely an elephant in the living room, though, the kind of news story mom and dad had tried their best to tiptoe around for as long as he could remember.

He went through the school day in a daze; not the best start at a new school, on a day he probably should have been spending trying to learn people’s names, to make a real start on making some friends.

It took until his lunch period for it to really sink in that there was a mark hidden under his sleeve; that somewhere, out there, was a Sentinel with a mark leading back to him. It left him a touch overwhelmed, to tell the truth, and he ended up in the nurse’s office for half of lunch, head between his knees.

Somewhere out there, someone was _meant for him_. Excuse him for freaking out a little.

 

* * *

 

 

Sentinels and Guides, or something like them, had been around for thousands of years. They’d been documented in ancient cultures across the world, the protectors of the tribe, or the town; kept everyone safe from unspecified ancient horrors one could only imagine.

There had always been more Guides than Sentinels - both because of mortality rates, and because of some genetic quirk Nick had never quite understood. Something to do with the X chromosome, he was pretty sure, but beyond that he was fine leaving it with the geneticists he sometimes saw on the news, debating this new legislation or that new drug.

A surplus of Guides might, in a better society, have led to the wider, ungifted parts of humanity leaving them the hell alone. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the way society had built itself up.

There were a lot of Guides who, on discovering they were banned from about half the professions available to literally every other law-abiding adult on the planet, ended up either in the kind of work Nick’s parents would be mad he knew about, or stuck in a badly-paid position as a counsellor, putting their empathic talents to use in HR departments or sports stadiums, and leave it at that.

It was technically illegal to refuse to hire a Guide on those grounds alone, had been ever since the Supreme Court ruled on it in the ‘80s, but people always found some excuse or another.

Nick, with the kind of determination only a fifteen year old could muster, knew he wasn’t going to end up like that. His dad had played NHL hockey, and as far as Nick was concerned, as far as he had been concerned since the first game he could remember, it was the only career path that mattered.

In the 60s, a Red Wing had his contract terminated for “unlawful conduct”, unspecified, and about a decade later the guy had come out with a book about his life as a Guide in the NHL. It was a good read, Nick found out some time later, but kind of a downer.

The guy found a Sentinel, eventually, a nice girl, and they’d started a family. It was the kind of thing they made movies about, when the nice girl was the Guide and the hockey player was the Sentinel.

Not many pairs had specific marks leading to one another; that was something science had given up investigating, eventually, left it to faith. Nick heard a lot about it at church, every Sunday at Mass, but he wasn’t the most attentive listener when the priest started in on David and Jonathan for the fifth time.

One night, after a church potluck, he’d overheard a couple of his parents’ friends discussing a schism from the 1800s. He really had no clue how adults got into that kind of conversation, but they seemed to have them a lot.

“Was that the group that decided Jesus was a Guide?”

“Pretty sure of it,” a voice replied. Nick could hear the clink of wine glasses being refilled. “Then half the church decided that invalidated the Trinity, somehow, split off to form a group convinced Judas was one instead. Apparently the betrayal thing was a sign of God’s disapproval.”

They all laughed. Nick, on the stairs, leaned his forehead against the banister, closed his eyes.

 

* * *

 

 

It was an effort to make friends, it turned out, and Nick was too used to keeping things to himself to really relate to the other kids in his year. They could all tell something was up, apparently, even when Nick was his usual friendly self.

None of them seemed to hate him, at least. His senior high was on the other side of town to his junior, and none of his old teammates had enrolled. The grapevine wasn’t quite strong enough to reach across Sudbury, thankfully.

So Nick kept to himself, mostly. He kept to wearing long sleeved shirts and cardigans, even on the hottest days, and laughed it off when anybody asked about it. He found himself rubbing at his mark absently, every so often, during boring classes, or at the end of lunch period, or on the bus home. It was comforting, in a weird way.

He tried not to wonder if his Sentinel did the same thing.

There’d been another Guide in his eleventh grade Algebra class, the sweetest girl he’d ever met. Her guidemark, on her neck, was harder to hide than his, and to her credit she never tried. Even after some kid found her in the bathroom after school and forced her on her knees, told her she should know her place.

As it turned out, she could do a decent chokehold as well as binomial equations. The kid who’d made her kneel got suspended for a week, and never bothered her again. He should’ve been expelled, really, but there were murmurs from the teachers about a ‘bright future’.

So Nick kept his mark hidden, and when he got chosen for the USNDTP he packed his suitcase and was on his way to Michigan almost before his parents could say goodbye.

He kept one hand on his mark the whole way there, through the layer of his shirt, and cardigan, and jacket. He felt like he was on the edge of something, heart hammering in his chest whenever someone glanced at his hands.

Get a grip, he thought savagely, digging his nails into his skin. The mark throbbed, almost like a warning, and Nick loosened his grip, curled up in his seat and stared out the window of the bus.

He let his forehead rest against the glass, the vibrations buzzing through his skull drowning out the growing pit of anxiety in his stomach for the time being.

As a rule, Nick didn’t like to dream. After his first evaluation he’d started dreaming about them with startling, unpleasant regularity, his subconscious twisting an already bad experience into something supernatural. He’d learned to deal with them, after a few months, learned to creep silently to the kitchen and muffle the sound of the microwave for warm milk.

So, nightmares, anxiety dreams, bad dreams, straight up weird dreams - it didn’t really matter, they were all unwelcome in Nick’s brain. Not that he had any choice in the matter, but he liked to think he had at least a few tricks for influencing it.

On the bus, curled up in his jacket, one hand on his forearm, he wasn’t sure what he expected to dream of. He had a rule against guessing, usually, but the circumstances were unusual. He hoped it was something good, either way, as he shut his eyes.

He kept his palm resting over his mark, fingers curled into the battered leather of his jacket, and slowly slid down into sleep.

Eventually, there was a forest, with trees just turning to fall, and a picnic bench with a red and white umbrella. The umbrella leaned just a little bit to the left, tilting with the breeze that rustled through the amber leaves.

Nick looked down at himself. Knowing it was a dream, he didn’t panic at the short-sleeved t-shirt, the way his mark stood out against the pale skin of his forearm. He tried not to look at it much while he was awake, but he still could’ve drawn it blindfolded. It was part of him.

Lounging on the picnic table, stretched in the fading evening sun, was a cat. Nick blinked. The cat was stretched all the way across the table, which meant - he took a step back as the cat arched its back. Right, big cat. Very big cat. He thought it might be a lynx, had a vague memory of seeing similar animals with the same pointy ears on a field trip to the zoo.

Nick, acting on the kind of dream logic that his waking self would dismiss immediately, looked over his shoulder, then down at the ground. There was a warm lump leaning against his legs, soft fur brushing against Nick’s hand as he reached down. A border collie, then, black and white fur, bright eyes, sharp teeth.

He’d always wanted a dog like that.

Feeling detached, Nick watched as, suddenly energised, the dog bounded off towards the table and the lynx, mounting the bench with ease. With a look back towards Nick, an inquisitive tilt of its head, the dog woofed and lay down, curling up within the big cat’s paws, fitting in comfortably.

Nick tried to take a step towards them, to recapture some of the easy warmth he’d felt from the dog, but found his legs wouldn’t cooperate, stayed rooted to the spot as the table moved further away.

There was someone stood on the other side of the table, suddenly, turned away from him. Nick tried to shout, but his mouth wouldn’t open; tried to wave but his arm wouldn’t move. It was frightening, watching the other figure get further and further away, until it seemed the gap between them measured miles rather than a few meters.

He woke up, sudden and quiet, gasping, and spent a long time looking out the window, not sure what the hell had just happened. He could almost feel fur under his fingers; looking down, his left palm was still resting over his mark, fingers crooked into the fabric of his jacket. He shook out his hand, felt pins and needles start to creep up from his fingertips to his elbow.

The woman sat across the aisle gave him a sympathetic look. “Travel doesn’t suit me either,” she said with a chuckle. “You want a mint?”

“Please,” said Nick, thankfully. “I guess I’m already a little homesick.”

“Oh, yeah?” The woman asked, leaning forward. “Where you headed?”

“The National Development Camp,” Nick replied, pride flowering in his chest. “I play hockey.”

“You must be pretty good,” said the woman, surprised. “I didn’t think they let kids like you on the big teams.”

Nick went cold. “What, uh, what do you mean?” He shoved his hands into his pockets. His left had crept back to his mark, subconsciously.

The woman raised her eyebrows. “Well, I know the law’s changed but people don’t change their minds so quickly, y’know.” She tugged her collar down just slightly; a cursive G was inked into her collarbone, no link that Nick could see. “I get a sense when there’s someone like us around. Don’t worry,” she soothed, reaching across the aisle to rest a hand on Nick’s knee. “No one else can tell. You hide it well.”

Nick couldn’t answer, a lump in his throat. He shrank back slightly, hands still in his pockets, struggled until he could get a few words out. “Leave me alone,” he said, barely a whisper. “I can’t- I have to-”

For just a moment Nick felt an echo of something awful; could see a depth of sadness in the woman’s eyes that frightened him, as deep and dark as a wishing well. “Alright, kid,” she said, leaning back into her seat. “Alright.”

They didn’t speak again. Nick gave her a tiny wave when she left the bus in Detroit. She waved back.

 

* * *

 

His billet family in Plymouth were nice, if a little distant. To be fair to them, Nick didn’t make the effort to get close, kept to himself and made plenty of excuses to stay in the room he shared with their son.

It was tricky, rooming with another guy. There were a lot of factors he hadn’t considered.

“You alright?” asked Stephen, one night only a few weeks into Nick’s time in Michigan.

It was a hot night, almost sweltering, and Nick had stripped down to his boxers under the blankets. Keeping his arms underneath was nearly impossible, but he’d had plenty of practice ignoring his body’s ideas about what to do in hot weather.

“I’m good,” Nick replied, turning over his pillow for what felt like the thousandth time that night. “It’s just a little hot.”

Stephen laughed. “Oh, I feel that,” he said cheerfully. Nick felt the need to shush him, for all that Stephen’s parents were all the way down the corridor. “If you want privacy, I could go sleep in the bathtub. It’d probably be nice and cold.”

Nick groaned. “You dick.”

“I try,” said Stephen, gathering up his pillows. “Seriously though, I’m gonna head out there. No offence, but you’re bumming me out a little.”

Nick grimaced, and took a second to pull in the thread of emotion he could feel leaking out. That’d been something he’d been trained to do, eventually, between the electrodes and the suppressants, but it wasn’t exactly easy to keep it up in the face of 75 degree heat in the middle of the night.

Stephen was in briefs. It took a lot of effort on Nick’s part not to stare as he left the room.

He could hear Stephen settling into the bathtub through the wall, a faint squeaking echoing against the tile.

As he heard some rather more private sounds start to echo, Nick screwed his eyes shut and held the pillow over his head. The emotional echo still got through, of course, but it was just enough shielding that he drifted off to sleep before he overheard anything that could’ve got him in trouble.

It was still unbearably hot at breakfast the next morning, the whole family listless as they poured out cereal. Nick wasn’t used to breakfast without mom and dad’s constant, affectionate chatter, so he mostly kept quiet, head bent over his bowl.

Stephen’s dad, Arthur, had the newspaper stretched across the table, as usual, and Nick caught the headline out of the corner of his eye. Something about a new formula for suppressants, couched in a bad pun and capital letters. He went back to his cereal, tried to ignore the prickling sense of unease spreading through his chest.

Practice that evening was okay, overall. Nick liked the feeling of being out on the ice, the body armour and practice jersey a comforting weight. It probably didn’t do anything to help him block out other people, but he definitely _felt_ like there was an extra layer around him mentally, a curtain wall to keep everyone out.

He grinned widely when his second attempt went in during the shootout - he was pretty bad at it, even after a few weeks of solid practice with dad in the summer. “Did you _see that_?” He asked Phil, as he skated back to the line.

“Pretty slick,” Phil agreed, raising his hand for a high five. Nick slapped it, still grinning, and settled in to watch the clock.

It was only a few minutes before practice ended, everyone filtering out to the locker room, a collective disappointment pressing in on Nick from all sides. It was always a little disappointing when practice ended; Nick was still trying to learn how to tune it out.

He showered quickly, like always, made sure to keep his forearm close to his chest. He knew Jack’s best friend was a Sentinel, had a feeling he’d probably be okay with Nick’s own situation, but he really had no idea where to begin explaining.

Everyone who knew either shared his last name or were sworn to the secrecy of doctor-patient confidentiality. He’d never actually had to _tell_ anyone. The prospect alone was intimidating.

The childish excitement over having a secret to keep had long since faded in the face of a thousand news reports, a couple dozen clinic visits, but he still sometimes felt the kind of thrill he remembered from seventh grade, the times he’d had to go to the nurse’s office with a headache from one too many pre-teen meltdowns.

Jack, apparently sensing some of Nick’s inner turmoil, gave him a friendly smack on the shoulder.

Nick rolled his eyes. “Weak, dude.”

“Whatever you say, Nick. Whatever you say.”

Nick stood up, stowing his skates away. “You talk to Sid recently?”

Jack shrugged. “We talk most days. It’s pretty weird not seeing him in school, I won’t lie to you.”

“I can imagine,” said Nick with a grimace. He’d only been away from home a week, still found himself waiting to bump into Marcus or Cara in the corridor.

“I’ve heard it gets easier,” said Jack, not sounding convinced. “I guess we’ll find out soon, huh?”

“Guess so,” said Nick, moving towards the exit, tugging his sleeves down over his wrists. “Let me know if you figure it out.”

Arthur usually picked him up from practice, but when Nick reached the front of the complex his truck was conspicuously absent. He sighed, wishing mom and dad weren’t so weird about cell phones. It wasn’t like he had anyone to solicit over text message, as dad was so fond of warning him about.

He ended up walking home, found the truck sat in the driveway and Arthur sat at the kitchen table, the newspaper open to the same page it had been at breakfast.

“Evening, kid,” said Arthur, looking up from his cup of coffee. “Sorry I didn’t come to pick you up, it went clear out of my head.”

“That’s alright, sir,” said Nick politely. The walk had been okay, the heat of the morning having faded to a more seasonal temperature. “Anything interesting in the paper?” He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, felt that same prickling sense of unease from the breakfast table winding up his spine.

“Nothing much,” he replied, shutting it with a rustle. “They’ve found some new drug for Guides, looks like it might be more effective than whatever they were using before.”

“Oh,” Nick said, feeling a little like he’d been punched in the stomach. “Is that interesting?”

“Maybe not to me,” said Arthur, levelly. He was looking at Nick over his glasses in a way that made Nick feel a little queasy. The uneasy feeling was getting worse. “Maybe for you. Though I don’t know that you’re on any of those pills either way.”

“Why would I be on those?” Nick asked, fighting to keep his voice steady. “I’m not- I mean I don’t-”

“Honestly, Nick, you must think I’m blind,” he said with a chuckle. “I know I’ve got these glasses and all, but it’s pretty plain what you are.” His smile was thin and unpleasant.

Nick straightened up. “I’m gonna go get ready for dinner.”

“No, you’re not,” said Arthur. “You’re going to tell me why you kept this from my family.”

He had Nick’s wrist in an iron grip. Nick swallowed, convulsively. “It’s a secret,” Nick said, sounding childlike even to his own ears. “I’m not allowed to tell anyone. Only management know, and my family.”

Arthur raised his eyebrows. “You’re a decent liar, I’ll give you that.”

“I’m not lying!” Nick hadn’t meant to shout, felt himself shrink back at the expression on Arthur’s face. His hand twitched, still caught in Arthur’s grip. He wanted to keep going, to tell Arthur exactly what he thought, but his voice wouldn’t co-operate. His mark itched.

“Sure, kid,” Arthur replied, letting go of his wrist. “Go pack your things. I won’t have you influencing my son with your… unnatural tendencies.”

“What?” Nick couldn’t quite make his lungs work, couldn’t get enough air to protest.  
“I’ll call the team, let them know you need a different billet. Such a shame you and Stephen couldn’t get along, but I hear it happens all the time.” Arthur wasn’t looking at him anymore, just looking back at the front page of the paper.

Nick, helpless, went to pack. He took off his jacket as he went, pulled up his sleeve to check, and found his mark looking just as it always did, despite the itch. He’d expected it to be red and inflamed, to have reacted somehow to what had happened. He traced it with a finger, lightly, felt tears start to build in the back of his throat.

Stephen hugged him goodbye in the morning. It was nice, Nick thought as he hugged back, arms coming up to grip Stephen’s sweater. He wished it could’ve lasted a little longer.

It was weird, going to school not knowing where he’d be going home to. He knew he should tell his parents, e-mail or call or something, but he was still feeling off-balance enough without adding to someone else’s problems.

Blocking out everybody at school was more difficult than usual, a headache building up behind his temples before lunch even started. Lunch was always the worst time for his empathy, a wall of three hundred kids all talking and _feeling things_ at once. On a better day he might appreciate the workout, but just then he was much more in favour of going to the nurse’s office and begging for a lie-down.

Of course, he didn’t get to do that, because his locker was on the other side of the school to the nurse’s office, and he didn’t get even halfway before having to duck into an empty classroom, vision going dark at the edges.

He collapsed into a chair, pressed his palms against his eyelids. It was difficult to pick out which emotions in his head were the ones he was feeling. He was so focused on it he barely registered the way his breathing had picked up, going ragged and uneven.

There was something leaning against his leg, panting softly. Not wanting to open his eyes, Nick reached down blindly, felt fur against his fingers. That… wasn’t what he’d expected.

Reluctantly he opened his eyes, looking down to find a familiar border collie lying impossibly on the floor of the chemistry lab.

“How’d you get in here?” Nick asked, between gasps. His lungs felt a little better already, his feeling of surprise apparently overriding the several hundred other emotions pouring into his head.

The dog, with a look that Nick would’ve called sarcastic on a human, woofed.

“Oh, not much of a talker then.” Nick shrugged, then slid off the chair to sit cross legged on the floor. The dog rested her head on his lap. “It’s probably not safe for you in the lab,” he pointed out. “I don’t think chemicals are much good for dogs.”

There was no response for the dog, who looked perfectly content to stay curled up next to Nick for the foreseeable future. Nick petted her fur absently, right handed, his left hand curled against his right forearm.

“I feel like I should give you a name,” said Nick, at length. “Never been great with names, though. Marcus asked me for a hamster name once; I said Hammy and he didn’t speak to me for three days.” He smiled at the memory.

The dog looked up at him, cocking her head. _Whatever you want_ , she seemed to be saying.

“That’s a lot of pressure,” Nick said with a laugh. “I’ll let you know when I come up with something good.”

With an agreeable woof, the dog disappeared.

Nick blinked. “Guess I’ll see you around,” he muttered, picking himself up off the floor. The cafeteria was probably still open for lunch, and his head was feeling a lot better.

During last period, a note came for him from the office. Jack Johnson, in the grade above, was taking Nick home with him to stay.

Nick looked at it for a while, brain still sluggish from the workout he’d been getting all day. Eventually he shrugged, and went back to struggling with binomial equations.

He liked Jack, he had to admit. The guy’s parents couldn’t be _that_ bad.

 

* * *

 

 

On the Thursday before Halloween, Nick got called into the coach’s office after practice.

“Good to see you, Nick,” said the manager, who had apparently come down special for the meeting. “Hope you’re settling in okay with the Johnsons.”

Nick shrugged. “They’re nice.” They _were_ nice, to be fair to them, scrupulously polite and accommodating of his occasional migraines. He’d been getting them more often, even with occasional interventions by the disappearing border collie, spending half his weekends laid up in his room with the lights off. He wasn’t sure he _liked_ them, per se, but he definitely liked Jack, and it was nice to share a room with a friend. Kind of like a permanent sleepover.

“That’s good to hear,” the manager replied, glancing over a file he had on his desk. “Now, Nick, we couldn’t help but notice you’ve been a little under the weather lately.”

“I guess.”

“Well, we were hoping you’d be up for a few extra training sessions,” the manager began, still looking through the file. He coughed. “Uh, training for your particular circumstances.”

Nick nodded hesitantly. “Couldn’t hurt, sir.”

“Excellent,” he said, closing the file with a decisive thump. “We’ve contacted your school to let them organise a good time in your schedule for the sessions. They’ll let you know about it every week, and if it’s not working just let us know.”

“Sure thing, sir.”

That night, lying flat on his back on the bottom bunk, Nick drifted to sleep with an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

The picnic table looked more worn than the last time he’d seen it, just a few months before. The trees were all in fall colours now, a burnished orange ocean of leaves surrounding Nick and his border collie. He could tell it was there without looking, now, already soothed by the familiar weight against his legs. The red-and-white umbrella cast a comforting shadow across the bench, even in the early afternoon light.

This time, he found he could move, walking towards the table almost without thinking. The bench was oddly comfortable, much more forgiving than it looked. The worn texture of the wood felt strange under his hands as he traced the seam from knot to knot, following with his eyes. Absently, Nick noticed another pair of hands tracing the seam of the wood, along the opposite edge. He could see the outline of a familiar mark, three links in a chain. An odd rumbling purr came from somewhere underneath the table, oddly soothing considering its source.

Nick looked up. The other boy looked back, eyes wide in surprise.

“Hello,” said Nick, politely.

“Здравствуйте,” said the boy, hesitantly. “Kак Вас зову́т?”

Nick wasn’t sure what to do. He knew he was dreaming, and he didn’t think people usually dreamt in languages they didn’t know.

“I’m Nick,” he said eventually. “Who are you?”

It was difficult to describe the other boy. Nick could see the lynx at his feet clearly, the soft caramel colour of its fur, the dark spots, but the boy himself was… blurry. Only his eyes were in focus, a steely gray. They were nice eyes, Nick thought absently.

“Mеня зовут Sergei,” said Sergei. Nick could at least make that out.

There was a moment, a few heartbeats, where they just looked at each other. It felt heavy.

Sergei reached across the table, fingers gentle as they reached towards Nick’s mark.

He woke up, between one breath and the next, as he felt the brush of Sergei’s hand along his forearm. Even in the dark of his room, the mark looked a little sharper.

It was difficult to get back to sleep, after that. He didn’t dream.

The first session was scheduled during Calc, which put a spring in Nick’s step on the way to the counsellor’s office. It wasn’t that he hated calculus, but… actually, it was definitely that he hated calculus.

The door shut behind him with a gentle _snick_ , and the counsellor beckoned him in, pointing towards a bean bag sat in a pool of sunlight. It was a nice room, even discounting the informal furniture, cream carpet and pale blue walls with an over-full bookcase along one wall.

“Morning, Nick,” said the counsellor, reaching a hand out for him to shake. Her wrist was pulled down by an impressive collection of bracelets, gently shifting as she moved. “Can I call you Nick?”

“Uh, sure,” said Nick. He took her hand, shook it quickly before dropping it. He hadn’t really touched anyone’s skin since eighth grade, the day he’d gone to help the teammate with a broken ankle and ended up in bed for three days, sleeping off the worst migraine of his life. It hadn’t been his best idea, in retrospect.

He felt a tingle go up his arm, catalogued the calm buzz as it dissipated somewhere around his elbow.

“Lovely,” she said, settling into her own chair. She’d pulled it out from behind the desk, but it still set her a good foot above Nick. “You can call me Mel.”

“Nice to meet you, Mel,” said Nick, settling back into the bean bag. He’d never really got the hang of them, always ended up with a stiff neck somehow. Craning his neck to keep eye contact with Mel didn’t help, so he dropped his gaze, studied her bracelet covered wrist where it rested on her knee, right leg crossed over her left.

The bracelets shifted again as Mel reached out, her fingers resting on Nick’s chin, tilting his head up. The buzz of calm he’d felt from the handshake came back, fizzing through his jaw and into his skull. It wasn’t really that calming. She narrowed her eyes, an assessing look Nick didn’t like.

Letting go without comment, she pulled off the bracelets. There was a familiar cursive G underneath, crisp and dark. “As you can see,” said Mel with a comforting smile. “We have something in common.”

“Right,” said Nick, swallowing. “So… what are these sessions for?”

“Well,” Mel replied, spinning to collect a folder from her desk. “You haven’t had any of the recommended training so far, so this session is just to get you up to speed. All that is optional,” she said, clearly noticing Nick’s surprise. “Your parents would have to opt into it, and they’ve clearly taken the laid back approach to your development.”

Nick bristled, but didn’t say anything. No point getting into an argument in his first ever session.

“Now,” Mel continued, opening the folder. “We’ll start out with some basic exercises. You seem to have pretty good natural control, but it can always be better.”

The basic exercises turned out to be mostly touch based, Mel resting a hand on his shoulder the whole hour, making him identify and block whatever she was feeling. It left him with a nagging headache and an unpleasant, raw kind of feeling in his chest.

After practice that evening he made a beeline for his bed, curling up under his blanket and waving off Mrs Johnson’s concern with a promise he’d make it down for dinner.

Jack came in soon after, pulling the curtain shut against the evening light. He sat on the bed, next to the lump that was Nick.

“Bad day?” He asked, quietly.

Nick nodded. “Pretty bad.”

“Hmm,” said Jack, resting a careful hand on Nick’s shoulder, through the blankets. “Wanna talk about it? Sid tells me I’m a great listener. He’d know, all the times he’s talked my damn ear off.”

Nick huffed a laugh. “It’s, uh, complicated.” He took a deep breath, tried to find the right words. “It started a long time ago.” Sitting up, he ran a hand through his hair.

Jack shifted sideways a bit, leaving a good few inches of space between their shoulders.

“You told me, the day we met, that your best friend is a Sentinel.”

“Sure,” said Jack. “Half the people I meet ask about Sid before they ask how I’m doing. Thanks for not doing that, by the way,” he continued, smiling across at Nick.

“Well,” Nick said, still trying to find the right words. It was even more difficult than he’d expected. “I had a session with the counsellor today. Uh, not the school counsellor, though. They brought someone in to talk to me, she’s gonna be in every week.”

Jack frowned. “Everything okay? I know it can be stressful, all the pressure on the team.”

“I’m fine. Well, uh, not really _fine_ , but it’s not the team. It’s me. It’s about me, I mean.”

“You got a dark secret, Nick? Oh, let me guess. You’re on the run, a deadly criminal hiding in a juniors hockey team. No, wait, you’re secretly 40, trying to get a second lease on life.” Jack nudged him with his elbow. Nick stiffened, a wave of Jack’s concern washing over him.

“No, I, uh. Obviously you remember I left my billet family,” he said, starting over. “I know I told you it was complicated, but it kind of… wasn’t. I didn’t want to leave, I mean. I guess that does make it complicated.”

“Kinda,” Jack replied. “Get to it, Nick, I’m getting anxious just looking at you.”

Nick sighed. “I left that family because the dad didn’t like me. He, uh, thought I was gonna hurt them somehow. Because of something about me.”

Jack frowned again, put a hand on Nick’s shoulder. “Whatever it was, I’ll beat him up for you.”

“You can’t just beat up everyone who doesn’t like your friends,” said Nick, smiling weakly. “I heard about the baseball team before I even met you. Word gets around.”

“But it was _so worth it_ ,” Jack replied. “Enough about me, though. I’m trying to be a good listener and you’re ruining it with all these ‘comments’ and ‘jokes’.”

“He kicked me out because I’m a Guide.” Nick said, in a rush. For a few moments, all he could hear was the rush of blood in his ears.

Jack stilled, next to him, then smiled again, softer than before. “Ever tell anyone that before?”

“No,” said Nick, with a shaky laugh. “Is it that obvious?”

“Kinda, buddy, kinda,” said Jack, patting his shoulder. “Hey, before it gets awkward - d’you want a hug or something? An affirmation? A coming-out party?”

Nick shoved him. “Save the coming-out party for when I get a boyfriend,” he said, before he could think better of it. His empathy was rarely what some might call ‘useful’, considering the headaches and the societal mistrust, but it was very good at sussing out sympathetic ears.

It was obvious to Nick, and probably to anyone with functional eyes, ears, or both, that Jack had more than strictly platonic feelings for Sid.

“I’ll keep it in mind,” said Jack, seriously. “But for real, hug?”

“Alright,” said Nick, leaning in. “Don’t tell the guys, though. I’d never live it down.”

Jack put a careful arm around Nick’s shoulders. “Your secret is safe with me.”

 

* * *

 

 

By the time his draft rolled around, a full season in the Development Program and half a season in Sudbury behind him, Nick was feeling a little more like himself and less like an odd amalgam of the outcast emotions of 600 teenagers.

Being back home with mom and dad definitely helped; he especially enjoyed the free reign he got on the family Tylenol. The sessions with Mel had continued for the whole school year, and by the end Nick was glad to leave the pale blue walls of her office behind him.

He kept the thoughts of it under wraps, along with the memories of his evaluations that cropped up every so often, when there was a news story on an errant Guide, or an ad for suppressants sandwiched between reruns of M*A*S*H.

There’d been no more dreams about the picnic table, or the forest. He’d waited for them, sometimes, after a particularly draining day, but apparently whatever had inspired them before wasn’t feeling up to it.

The border collie still appeared, at times. Memorably, she’d popped up during a session towards the end of his year in Ann Arbor.

Mel hadn’t been able to see her, of course, but Nick had nearly cried with gratitude. The sessions had evolved over time, from the earlier exercises, to a weird mix of sociology and history, and then to a kind of lecture series on The Duties Of A Guide. He hadn’t minded the sociology part, but the lectures were a little much.

He’d needed the comfort of her curled next to him, a headache pounding against his temples, for a while after the session was officially over. He didn’t like the sound of most of his supposed Duties.

Mel had never pushed him, to be fair to her. She’d never brought in a real life Sentinel to practice all those Duties on, never had him backed into a corner and forced him to bring someone out of a zone. It still felt like she had, though. Nick felt like he was backed into a corner every time he stepped into her office.

It felt like his whole life had been backed into a damn corner.

There were just so many things _expected_ of him, so many books on his apparently innate behaviour, so many ideas she’d had about him he hadn’t been strong enough to disprove. She’d put him in a box, the repressed Guide who needed a good influence to drag him out into respectability.

The border collie, still unnamed but affectionate as ever, had pressed into his side and nosed up against his cheek while Mel told him about what might be expected of him. He could sense something dark underneath her words, all kinds of unpleasant nouns like ‘obligation’ and ‘service’, but he couldn’t yet puzzle it out.

“I think you should consider dropping hockey,” she’d said, one session late in the year, after spending a full hour pressing against Nick’s shields. “Give yourself more time to train.”

Nick hadn’t had the energy for anything beyond a frown. “But it’s my draft year,” he’d said, trying desperately not to whine. “I can’t just stop.”

“You can,” said Mel, dropping back into the desk chair. “And you should. God knows you never do what you’re supposed to, though.”

She’d stopped being quite so nice to him a few months in. Apparently he was a difficult case.

When the scouts at the Combine asked if there was anything he needed to disclose, he kept his mouth shut and both his hands at his sides, no matter how much his arm itched.

 

* * *

 

 

Nick liked Ottawa.

The arena was in an odd place, sure, and it got very cold in the winter, colder than he would’ve liked, but it was a good city. After three full seasons in Sudbury he was very ready to move on up to the big leagues, get away from home with mom and dad.

Having dad as a coach had been fun for about a season and a half, before it started feeling a little constricting. It was all well and good having your dad coach you in pee-wee, when it was easy to tune out his critiques on the drive home with the thoughts of the ice cream mom had promised, but at nearly 20 Nick was a little sick of it.

So moving out to Ottawa had been a relief, even with the yo-yo that was getting called up from Binghamton and sent back down, and having his own apartment was even better. He could’ve shared, but he was looking forward to wearing short sleeves in the summer, at least in the privacy of an apartment, and he had the funds for it.

No point putting more pressure on himself, when the NHL sometimes made him feel like he was getting slowly crushed under the weight of expectation.

“Ready for the game?”

Nick looked up from his laces. Morning skate had gone well; he was feeling okay, his shields usually a little stronger on home ice than as a visitor. Spezza was standing over him with a grin, already in street clothes. “Uh, yeah, I guess,” he mumbled, shrinking back a little.

Spezza was a Sentinel, Nick was sure of that. He could _feel_ it, somewhere inside a part of his brain that most people never had to use. It put him on edge, which was a shame because Spezza really was a nice guy. It helped that he already had a Guide, a girlfriend the team was absolutely not allowed to meet.

“Wow, you sound real confident,” said Spezza with a grin. “Buck up, kid, you’re doing great.”

Nick was struck by how happy the praise made him, back in the same part of his brain that acknowledge Spezza’s Sentinel nature. It was unsettling, despite the endorphins. He nodded in agreement, lost for a more appropriate response, while Spezza moved on to bother Alfie.

He pressed himself back into his stall, backed up in the corner, and rubbed his eyes. He was getting a headache.

They won the game, 5-4. Nick spent most of it on the bench, with limited shifts, but that was alright. His head still ached; he was usually fine with the roar of the crowd, but any weakness in his shielding was liable to invite more problems. There were only so many times a guy could faint in the medical room before someone caught on.

Spezza got three assists, and smiled cheerfully at Nick as he skated past. Nick smiled back, feeling lost.

When he got home that evening, weaving easily through the media scrum around Dany and Spezza in the the room, he spent a long time on google, researching things he hadn’t thought about since he’d left Ann Arbor.

There were a lot of sketchy websites out there, it turned out. The first time Nick clicked on what looked like a serious article to find himself redirected to a porn site he slammed his laptop shut so hard he was afraid he’d broken it.

As it turned out, the happy feeling he’d got was fairly normal, at least according to Wikipedia, the only website he was willing to trust wouldn’t send him to Pornhub.

“This is your last chance, internet,” Nick muttered as he scrolled through the page. There wasn’t much concrete research on Matching, as it turned out. No one really wanted to talk about it after it happened to them, and it was random enough that it was difficult to control for.

He traced his mark, thoughtfully. He’d known it was unusual to have a mark tailored to one specific Sentinel; according to Wikipedia, hopefully reliable source, just under 15% of all Sentinel/Guide pairs had one: a single suitable Match. The rest paired up out of necessity, as far as Nick could tell. It was all couched in the kind of scientific language he’d avoided like the plague since finishing his SATs.

Nick was fairly sure he’d realise if the boy at the picnic table had been Jason Spezza.

 _Time for bed, Nick,_ he thought, closing the laptop with care. Now he knew he wasn’t going to spontaneously Match with Spezza, he was fine with leaving the rest of his research for another day.

The rest of the season passed, and the team got worse. It was mystifying to Nick, considering the strong start, but nothing they were doing seemed to work. When they lost in the first round, it wasn’t particularly surprising, but it still hurt.

Fucking Pittsburgh.

 

* * *

 

It took another couple of seasons in Ottawa for Nick to realise that there were pretty much no other Guides in the league.

Of course, he reasoned, it was always possible there were guys he hadn’t met who were hiding like he was, but he didn’t think that was the case. He knew when other Guides were around, now, could finally understand what the woman on the bus had meant all those years ago. The back of his neck prickled, a feeling like nails on a chalkboard inside his head. It felt just as pleasant as the metaphor made it sound.

It was better with Matched sets, less of a clash of emotions, but it was still difficult.

So he was fairly sure there weren’t any others in the league. Clearly, they’d all taken the optional training and gone into the traditional career paths - nursing, or childcare. Back before the reform in the law, before the Supreme Court judgement, they would’ve been housebound after a match, and working below stairs before one.

Nick didn’t like to think about it.

October of 2010 rolled around without much fanfare, for all that it was the beginning of a Whole New Season. They’d gone out against the Penguins in the first round, again, and Nick was still bitter about it.

Someday, they’d draw a better team in the first round, but until then Nick was stuck in a hotel room in Philadelphia in mid-November, trying to drop off for a pre-game nap.

He drifted off eventually, half in his suit, to the familiar sound of a breeze rustling through leaves.

The picnic table was sat in the same place it always was, of course, but this time Nick could see the man sat there before he reached it, could almost make out some of his features as he walked forward.

At his feet, the border collie yelped happily and sprang forward to meet the lynx, who was upright for once, pacing the border of the clearing.

Sergei looked up, and smiled.

He was still blurry, but not so much so that Nick couldn’t make out his eyes again, that familiar gray, and the slight fidgeting motion of his hands.

“Hi,” said Nick, sliding onto the opposite bench. He couldn’t quite bring himself to sit next to him, as if that would be too familiar. Dream logic, probably.

“Hello,” replied Sergei.

Nick smiled across at him. “It’s been a while.”

Sergei smiled back. His smile was clear as well, happy and bright. Nick felt his stomach drop, a tingling feeling wind up his spine.

“It has,” Sergei agreed, eventually. He was looking at Nick, taking in details Nick wasn’t sure existed. He looked down at his clothes, realised he was once again wearing a short sleeved t-shirt. He missed his cardigan.

His mark stood out on his arm, of course, the three links seeming to glow slightly in the fading light.

Sergei stretched his hand across the table. “Can I touch?” He asked, accent winding around his words.

Nick nodded, offering his hand. Sergei took it in one hand, laced their fingers together. The tingling feeling in Nick’s spine spread down his arm, reaching the tips of his fingers. Sergei jumped slightly.

“Sorry,” Nick said, embarrassed.

“Is okay,” said Sergei, taking his hand once more. “A big moment, yes?”

“Yeah,” agreed Nick, swallowing thickly.

Sergei’s other hand covered his mark, sent a wave of an emotion Nick wasn’t sure he wanted to name coursing up through his throat. His breath caught. Sergei, focused on Nick’s arm, didn’t seem to noticed. After a few moments he traced the word on Nick’s arm, just once, with a fingertip, then sat back.

“Know what this means?” He asked, smiling as he tapped the cursive.

“To be honest, I have no fucking clue,” said Nick. “Always wanted to find out, though.”

Sergei smiled at him again, tilting his head. “It means _light_.”

Nick’s alarm woke him up before he could ask what the hell that was supposed to tell him. He lay on the bed for a long moment, listening to the beep beep of the alarm, trying to catch his breath.

He sat up, feeling dizzy. There was a familiar pressure in his head, the emotions of half the hotel pouring straight into his limbic system. It hurt, in a kind of detached way. He’d almost gotten used to it, back in elementary school, in the evaluations.

His breath hitched again. Not the best thing to be thinking about after a dream like that.

Nick sighed, and stood up. It was time to get to the rink, either way.

The game, frankly, sucked.

They were down 2-1 by the end of the first period, Spezza (of course) getting their only goal while Nick felt kind of like his skates had been encased in cement. He’d felt weird ever since getting to the rink, unable to shake off the feeling of the dream, of a gentle hand on his arm.

Philadelphia’s goalie was just ridiculous, as it turned out. Nick did have to admit that Bobrovsky was a first class hockey name, though. He hoped the guy allowed a couple more goals though, for Nick’s sake, and for Ottawa’s. Their confidence was bruised enough without the undrafted rookie getting on an even hotter streak.

Nick loved Moose, but he got the sense he wasn’t enjoying Ottawa’s defense at all.

That was ignoring Moose’s game in the second, of course, keeping them at 2-1 even as the Flyers peppered him with shots.

Near the end of the period Nick went over the boards with an odd feeling thrumming under his skin. He was feeling good, of course, always did when people were happy around him - even if those people were 19000 Flyers fans - but nothing quite like he’d felt before.

The moment his skates hit the ice he pushed off, following play up the ice into the Flyers’ zone. He kept an eye on Neiler, winding up for a slapshot, and backed into the crease, barely avoiding colliding with Bobrovsky, square on to Neiler in the half butterfly. Nick sighed, trying to set up a screen on the guy and, without quite realising it, forgot to brake as his skates carried him further back. His bare wrist brushed across Bobrovsky’s neck.

The whistle blew, goaltender interference, and Nick skated to the box with a frown. He was usually better at keeping his skates under him. He looked across the ice, caught a glimpse of Bobrovsky’s eyes through his mask. They were familiar, in a way that froze Nick’s breath in his chest.

Not _now_.

Abruptly, everything he’d been managing to push away - the crowd, the Flyers, the rest of his team - caved in on him at once. It felt like being crushed in an avalanche.

He played like shit from that point on. Coach benched him halfway through the third and, forgetting himself, Nick sent him a grateful smile.

“The fuck is up with you tonight, Fligs?” He shouted, barely audible over the sound of the crowd celebrating yet another Flyers goal. The shot clock sat at 41-28, and it wasn’t looking like his team were going to get many more chances.

Nick frowned. “I don’t feel well, coach,” he said, honestly. It took a while to get the words out, everything slowed down under the weight in his brain.

“Well for fuck’s sake don’t sit there and make the whole team sick,” Coach shouted, gesturing towards the tunnel. “Go lie down, have a nice little nap, and come back next game ready to _play_.”

With a sigh, Nick pulled himself up, felt himself waver in his skates with every step. He felt stranger the further down the tunnel he got, barely made it to the medical room before his knees gave out.

“Jesus,” said a medic, who’d been sat on an examination table watching the game. “Can you walk, kid?”

Nick shrugged. “Maybe… I don’t feel great.”

The medic frowned, mouthed something to himself that looked suspiciously like _concussion_.

“‘M not concussed,” said Nick, annoyed. He looked around vaguely. “Where’s Alex?”

Alex was the team’s registered Guide. The medic’s eyes widened, before he moved away to call into the next room. “Alex, get in here!”

She arrived quickly, moving with an odd grace to crouch in front of Nick. She put a careful hand on Nick’s knee. He flinched.

“Oh, dear,” she said quietly. “It’s always a shock, isn’t it.” She turned back to the medic, who was staring with undisguised curiosity. “Give us some privacy, mate.”

Nick struggled to remember the exercises Mel had taught him, all those years ago. The first step, the part where you took a step back and assessed what exactly had gone wrong, was beyond him. It was like he was drowning, backed into a corner, stuck in a downpour without an umbrella. Too many things were happening at once.

“Nick,” said Alex, firmly. “I’m going to take your hand, now. You clearly need some help right now, but I won’t do anything you wouldn’t be doing yourself, if you were in less of a state.”

Nick nodded, offering his hand. Alex took it, and closed her eyes. Nick felt her picking her way through his head, gentle but still intrusive, sorting through the emotions of 20,000 people to find the ones that were Nick’s alone. Confusion, mostly. Some fear. A little excitement.

It took long enough that, through the wall, Nick could feel the rest of the team coming into the locker room. The brittle sting of disappointment reached him, a curl of sadness winding through his ribs.

Alex smiled at him, reassuringly. “We’ll have to let the team know about this.”

Nick stilled. “Do you have to? I’ve - I’ve managed fine until now.”

“There are more of you than you think, Nick,” said Alex, letting go of his hand. “But don’t worry. We’re very discrete - there are laws about this kind of disclosure.”

With a sigh, Nick stood up. “Thank you. I have to - I need to get changed. Thanks. Um. Bye.”

He fled. He could feel, through his slowly reforming shield, a fleeting brush of sadness against his back.

Lingering in the showers, Nick risked a glance at his mark. It stung, faintly red and irritated. The cursive, ‘light’, was amber now, the colour of leaves in the fall.

 

* * *

 

 

 

Sergei hadn’t wandered into his dreamscape since Nick’s meltdown, with most of Nick’s trips to the picnic table being solely accompanied by the border collie and the lynx, who Nick was getting to be friendly with. Her fur was very soft, when she let him close enough to pet it. He missed Sergei though, for all that he’d seen the man twice, and still didn’t know what the guy really _looked_ like. He’d seen enough men with similar grey eyes since he’d caught that glimpse of Bobrovsky’s through his mask to doubt his initial worries, but either way Nick spent a lot of time at the picnic table hoping fruitlessly that the man himself would show up, miraculously un-blurry, to dispel all his doubts.

Going back into the locker room after the minor meltdown had been difficult.

“You alright?” Moose had asked, hovering over Nick’s stall as he got into his suit.

“Not really,” said Nick, unexpectedly honest. He ran a hand through his hair. “Think I’m getting a migraine.”

“Ouch,” said Moose, sympathetically. “You get them a lot?”

“When I was younger,” Nick replied, buttoning his shirt. “I got them practically monthly in elementary.”

Moose winced. “That’s not fun.”

“No,” Nick agreed. “It really wasn’t.” He’d mostly got them after his evaluations, of course, the mixed effect of the suppressant withdrawal and the painful rush of everyone around him as his walls came down and slowly, painfully rebuilt. “Still,” he continued, pushing down the memory. “It’s been over a decade. If I start getting them again now I’m gonna register a complaint with God.”

“You’re such a good Catholic,” Moose laughed, clapping him on the shoulder. Nick hoped he’d managed to hide the flinch.

When he got home that night, the news was running a story on a Guide trafficking ring in Eastern Europe. Nick shut it off, stabbing at the remote hard enough to bruise his fingers, and collapsed face first into bed.

A greatest hits edition of some of his worse childhood dreams kept him up most of the night, but at least he could lie in the dark, still silence of his room and not worry about getting found out.

To say it was disappointing getting knocked out in the first round for the third time in Nick’s career was underselling it a bit. It hadn’t even been the Penguins that time, and taking the Rangers to seven games the year Tortorella took them to the Final was probably impressive, objectively, but Nick couldn’t quite stifle the sense of resentment every time he saw a commercial for the series.

The phone call from his agent was just icing on the cake.

“Nick, I’ve got some news,” he began, clearly apprehensive.

Nick sighed. “Where am I headed?” He’d had an inkling about the trade, even before his sisters started texting him trade rumor articles with a string of 15 or 20 question marks.

“Columbus,” his agent replied, with an attempt at cheer. “They’re on the up-and-up, I’m hearing. They’re working on getting a couple of good pieces for Nash, I’m pretty sure.”

“I’m pretty sure there’s nowhere to go but up in Columbus,” said Nick, with a sigh. “Alright, I’ll start packing. No point wasting time, huh?”

“Probably not,” said his agent with a chuckle. “I’ll call to talk about contract BS sometime soon, okay?”

“Sure,” said Nick. He rang off, then went to dig in his closet for good packing up clothes. 

Getting traded to Columbus had never exactly been part of Nick’s life plan; despite himself, he felt a little excited about it.

Not that he had a particularly well defined life plan, of course, beyond the every-NHLer desire to win the cup, and the unique personal goal of not telling anyone he was a Guide except under extreme duress.

He’d been doing alright with both parts of it, really, with the exception of the minor meltdown at Wells Fargo. The occasional strange dream, sepia-toned and soothing, didn’t really count against either point.

A few hours later, knee deep in packing tape and styrofoam, he checked his phone to find a voicemail from Jack.

Huh. Nick thumbed it open, putting it on speaker while he went back to struggling with his coffee maker. He’d almost forgotten Jack had been traded, only peripherally aware of all the Carter drama in the middle of his own season.

“Hey, Nick,” said Jack’s voice, tinny but still familiar, emerging from the tiny speaker. “I just saw the news. Let me know when you’re getting here, I’ll show you around. It’ll, uh, it’ll be nice to catch up.”

Nick smiled, finally wrestling the coffee machine into submission. He sealed the box swiftly, before the flaps could spring back open, and returned Jack’s call, leaning up against the kitchen counter.

Jack picked up on the second ring. “Hiya, stranger,” he said, cheerfully, his voice crackling down the line.

“Hi, Jack,” said Nick, stretching his free arm above his head, smiling at the crack of his elbow as it straightened out. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, his mark fully visible. “How’re things with you?”

“Nowhere near as interesting as they are with you, I’m hearing,” said Jack. There was a hissing sound over the phone. “Sorry, just opening a Coke. It’s pretty fucking hot down here.”

“I’m sure I’ll find out for myself soon enough,” Nick replied. “And a Coke does sound pretty good right now.” He looked mournfully across at his fridge, which he’d managed to block in with the few boxes he’d already filled.

“Well, I’ll let you enjoy this one via the phone,” said Jack with an audible smile. “It’ll be good to have you, anyway. The guys here are all surprisingly nice, considering how miserable this season was.”

Nick winced. “Next year will be better,” he said, with a confidence he didn’t feel.

“That’s what we’re telling ourselves,” Jack mused. “Let’s not talk about that, though,” he continued, hastily. “How’s the whole, uh, deadly secret thing going for you.”

Of course Jack would remember Nick’s deeply embarrassing speech, after all these years. “It’s not really going. I had a, uh, bad turn during a game last season, but since then I’ve got it pretty much under control.” He wasn’t sure how to explain the dream situation. It was a shock to realise that he’d never actually talked about that part of his life with, well, anyone except the one person who shared it.

Not that it would be particularly easy to explain. Nothing about being a Guide was, as far as Nick was concerned.

“Glad to hear they’re treating you right,” said Jack, unaware of Nick’s slight personal crisis. “I was worried I was gonna lose track of you someday, but you’ve always been out there, being just as much of a pest as you always were.”

“We were on the same team for like two months,” said Nick, without any real heat. “Just because we shared a bunkbed-”

“Oh god, don’t tell the team about that,” Jack laughed. “It’s bad enough they know about Sid, I can’t reveal too much of my childhood this quickly.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Anyway, it’s awesome to talk to you but I was kind of making dinner when you called and it smells pretty close to burning,” said Jack, unhurried. “Text me your flight plans, I’ll come pick you up from the airport.”

“Will do, Jack.”

Jack hung up without a goodbye, but Nick found he didn’t mind too much.

He spent another hour or two packing, got takeout for dinner, and fell asleep feeling, if not cheerful, at least halfway there.

The murmur of the leaves in the breeze struck him first. The umbrella above the table was back, red-and-white and bright as ever, and Sergei was sat at the table.

Nick moved, took one step and covered the fifty or so feet between himself and the table. Sometimes he loved dreaming.

Sergei didn’t look up as he approached and slid into his usual seat opposite. The table never seemed to get any bigger as Nick grew, but it was always just the right height. It was comforting.

When Sergei still didn’t look up, Nick frowned, followed his gaze across to a knot in the table. It definitely didn’t seem enthralling enough to distract Sergei so completely.

Nick got up and, with some reservation, slid onto the bench next to Sergei, close enough to brush shoulders. “Hey,” he said, quietly. “Uh, you alright?”

No response. There was an icy feeling in Nick’s stomach. He knew what this was, had a sudden recollection of a particular hour with Mel where she’d given a lecture about zoning out.

“They get lost in it, sometimes,” she’d said, stood with her elbows resting on the windowsill. “Takes a hell of an effort to get them back.”

“Hey,” he said, again, resting his hand on Sergei’s lower back. He didn’t remember the script Mel had taught him, had a vague memory of finding it embarrassing beyond belief. “Hey, I know that’s probably the most interesting thing in the world, right now, but why look at that when you could be looking at me?” He paused. “Uh, not to sound self-centred or whatever. Can’t say I’ve had any practice doing this, so I’d appreciate you coming back and letting me know just how bad a job i’m doing. It’ll save me waking up and worrying about you.”

His other hand moved to rest on Sergei’s arm, over his mark. Nick traced it lightly, the word _protect_ written in something just a little neater than Nick’s usual scrawl.

Nick felt more than saw Sergei move, slumping a little in his seat. His gaze shifted to rest on Nick’s hand.

“Oh,” he said, eventually. “Hello, Nick.”

“Hi,” said Nick, crushing relief spilling out into his chest. “You had me worried for a second there.”

“Mmm,” said Sergei. “Sorry, it is very tiring, doing that.”

“Good thing you’re already asleep,” Nick said with a fond smile. “I had a pretty long day myself.” Abruptly, he realised his left hand was still on Sergei’s lower back. He blushed.

Sergei smiled across at him, sly. “Do not worry,” he said precisely. “I would let you touch me in much worse places.”

Nick snorted, loudly. “Well, when we finally run into each other… just keep it in mind.”

“Good idea,” Sergei replied. He leaned sideways, let himself rest against Nick’s chest. Nick got a mouthful of sandy blond hair, twisted his head until his cheek was resting comfortably on top of Sergei’s head.

“I wonder what happens if we fall asleep in the dream,” he mused, brushing his thumb back and forth across Sergei’s mark.

“You never see Inception?” Sergei asked, smiling into Nick’s neck.

 

* * *

 

 

Jack was waiting for him at Arrivals when Nick got to Columbus, just shy of three days after he got the call from his agent. He’d packed most of his essentials before remembering, on day two, that there were people he could hire to pack up the rest and send it across the border.

“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.” Jack grinned, spreading his arms wide.

Nick laughed and swept him into a quick hug, squeezing him around the middle. “Good to see you too, buddy.”

“You’re getting good at that,” said Jack with a laugh. “Right, we gotta hurry now, we’ve got like 10 minutes until I get a ticket.”

Nick gestured towards the exit. “Lead on, Johnson. I’ve got no damn idea where I’m going.”

“Same old, same old, then,” said Jack, as they jogged across the parking lot, rain lightly showering the asphalt.

He didn’t get to reply until they were both buckled into Jack’s car, safe away from the rain and rapidly gathering wind. He could feel Jack’s happiness pressing up against his shield, let it buoy him up a little from the post-flight exhaustion.

“I usually have some idea where I’m headed,” he said eventually, watching the turn signal blink on the dash.

“Whatever you say, Fligs,” Jack replied, eyes on the road. “A baby could find their way around Ottawa.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

Jack rolled his eyes, then changed the subject. “Any news? I mostly read the sports pages, you know me.”

Nick smiled thoughtfully. “Well, there’s been a couple of things. One of them has to wait until we reach your apartment, though, I don’t want you crashing the car.”

“I’m a very good driver,” Jack said, somehow managing to change lanes with a flourish. “But alright, we’ll table whatever that is. What’re the other things?”

Nick rambled about Lisa’s lacrosse results for the rest of the drive, pride managing to cover his rising anxiety for the time being. Jack really was a good listener, supplying noises of agreement or surprise at just the right moments, asking good questions without taking control of the conversation.

They reached the apartment a little before noon, the rain starting to clear on that side of the city. Nick grinned up at the apartment block, ten storeys of old fashioned brick and mortar. It was exactly the kind of place he’d imagined Jack living, somehow.

Jack was on the fourth floor. They took the elevator, after an optimistic attempt at the stairs left Nick with a nasty bruise on his shin from his suitcase.

He stood rubbing at it while Jack unlocked his front door, hissing occasionally. “Bastard suitcase,” he commented as he came through the door, setting it down by the coffee table and collapsing onto the couch.

Jack came and sat beside him, melting gratefully into the cushions. “Alright,” he said cheerfully. “What the hell kind of news could you have that’d make me crash my car?”

Nick looked at his hands, pinched the hem of his cardigan sleeve. “This is kind of a long story.”

“It always is with you.” Jack grinned. Nick shoved him, just hard enough that he had to fight to stay upright on the couch.

“How much do you actually know about the whole, uh, Matching thing?” Nick asked, rolling his sleeve between his fingers. He felt, for the first time in fifteen years, the urge to bite his nails. He’d switched to biting his lip around about fifth grade, which mom hadn’t really preferred. He could remember the feeling of her fingers, gentle against his chin, as she frowned.

Jack shrugged. “Not all that much. Sid hasn’t found his Guide yet, as far as I know, and you’re the only other person I know who it applies to.”

Nick sighed. “It’s super fucking weird, man.”

“I think I’d got that far,” said Jack, rolling his eyes. Nick shoved him again. “Alright, Jesus. See if I ever let you on this couch again.”

“Oh, wow, what a loss that would be,” Nick replied, deadpan. “But seriously, it’s really weird.”

He paused, then glanced down. The border collie was sat against his legs, a warm, safe feeling radiating into his bones. He smiled. “Basically, I found my Sentinel.”

“Holy shit, dude!” Jack grinned, holding up a hand for a high five. Nick gave him one, then sat back.

“Yeah, pretty much. I’ve kind of known about him since I was in, like, eleventh grade, but that’s a whole other deal, and I don’t think even I understand what’s going on there.” He gave the border collie an apologetic glance. She woofed up at him, as if to say, _no worries Nick, this really is pretty damn weird._ At least he hoped that was what she meant.

“So what’s he like?” Jack asked, folding his legs underneath him on the couch cushion. It made him look a little like a teenage girl at a sleepover, but Nick guessed that was pretty much where the conversation was heading anyway, emotionally, so he didn’t mention it.

Nick looked back down at his hands. “He’s sweet,” he said. It wasn’t quite how he’d meant to start out, but it was the truth. “He’s sweet, and kind of a dick, and I’m, uh, pretty sure he’s the new goalie.”

Jack raised his eyebrows. “Kinda buried the lede there a little bit, Nick.”

Nick laughed. “Yeah, kinda.” He stilled, gripping the edge of his sleeve again. “I just realised - I never actually showed you the mark, did I? Just kinda collapsed on the bed and drew you into my teen drama.”

“It was a little more than teen drama, Nick,” said Jack. “But no, you never did. Didn’t seem right to ask, either.”

It felt oddly anti-climactic, Nick realised as he rolled up his sleeves. He’d put on a short sleeved shirt for the flight, just the cardigan covering up his mark, so uncovering it took about four seconds. It was a big moment for something that took four seconds.

The links were still in black ink, despite the weird dream, but the amber script stood out as much as always. Jack looked at it in silence for a good thirty seconds, an unreadable expression on his face.

At length, he sat back. “It’s pretty,” he said, thoughtfully. “Not sure what else to say, to be honest with you.”

“Neither am I,” Nick replied, rolling his sleeve back down. “Thanks, anyway. Wanna order lunch?”

“Absolutely,” said Jack reaching for his phone. “What are you thinking?”

“Whatever you like,” said Nick, stretching up until his spine popped. “I really don’t mind.”

 

* * *

 

They ended up going out for dinner.

Jack had made a name for himself on the team as a good dinner partner, apparently, because he managed to scrounge up half a dozen guys on a couple of hours’ notice, and get them all to the right place in Downtown to meet up.

The rain had cleared up completely by mid-afternoon, during an impromptu tour of the neighbourhood, so the early evening sky was bright and clear. It was a lovely night, as far as Nick was concerned.

The half a dozen guys spotted them as they came down the sidewalk, past a couple of nice-looking restaurants.

“Hi, everyone,” he said as they got close enough to make out individuals. “Nice to meet you, probably.”

“Only probably?” A guy with a head of blond curls and a wide grin shook his head ruefully. “We gotta step up our game.” He stuck out a hand. “Cam Atkinson. I’m taller than I look in real life.”

Nick laughed and shook his hand. He only felt a flicker against his shields, comfortingly uncomplicated. Cam introduced him to the rest of the guys, Matt and Joey and Tyutin.

“We’re still waiting on Bob - he wanted to walk, god knows why,” Cam explained. “He seems like a cool guy, though. You know him?”

“I hope so,” said Nick.

“Oooh, cryptic,” Cam said, approvingly. “I like this whole mysterious thing you’ve got going. The plaid cardigan really sets it off.”

“Shut up, Cam,” said Matt. “Let the new guy settle in for two seconds before you freak him out.”

“Don’t worry,” Nick said, sticking his hands in his pockets. “It takes a lot to freak me out.”

A prickling feeling settled at the back of his neck.

“I can believe it,” came a voice from behind him. He turned, the prickling feeling spreading out to his fingertips lightning quick.

“Oh,” he said, intelligently. “Hi.”

Sergei grinned at him. “Hi.” He was wearing denim shorts with a floral print, which should have looked faintly ridiculous, and a waistcoat over a t-shirt, which absolutely did. Nick felt his heart skip a beat. His face was probably doing something really embarrassing, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to care.

Cam bounced up to him. “Glad you could make it, Bob,” he said. “This is Nick. He was pretty cagey when I asked if you knew each other?”

“We have never met before,” said Sergei, carefully, still grinning. “But I think we know each other, yes.”

Nick rolled his eyes, then stepped forward. “Come on, we’re supposed to be getting dinner. Sushi waits for no man.” He held out a hand.

Sergei looked down at it, a frown creasing his forehead.

“Hey,” said Nick quietly. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

With a sigh, Sergei took his hand. Nothing happened.

Nick smiled. “See?”

Sergei shook his head as Nick tugged him over to greet the rest of the guys. No one commented on the hand-holding, although Nick saw Cam mouthing something vaguely threatening at Johansen.

They sat next to each other at the sushi place, Nick attempting to translate the cross-talk into something Sergei might understand.

“I understand lots,” he explained, quietly, leaning in so close that Nick could feel the words more than hear them. “But speaking is, ah, not easy.”

“That’s cool,” said Nick, with a nod. “Not like I speak any Russian.” He rubbed at his forearm, self-consciously. “I don’t even know how the letters work.”

“I show you later,” said Sergei, even more quietly, even closer to Nick’s skin. He shivered, just slightly.

The food was good, but Nick was feeling more than a little distracted and didn’t get to really savour it. He figured, when considering the wider picture, that he could always go back to the restaurant. He was only going to get so much time sat with Sergei, trying to explain whatever the hell Cam was going on about, soaking in the happiness coming in from all around the table, laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe at one of Joey’s stupid asides.

He was pretty sure he was going to like Columbus.

It was almost eleven by the time they left the restaurant, a generous tip for the server and about thirty empty dishes in their wake.

“Have a good evening,” Nick said, slapping Cam on the back. “It was great to meet all of you.”

“Hey, you too,” Cam replied, smiling wide. He looked over Nick’s shoulder, spotted Sergei waiting. “You’ve probably got something good planned, huh?”

Nick flushed. “Oh, uh, nothing planned.”

“Sure thing, Fligs,” said Cam, patting him on the shoulder. “I’ll see you soon.”

“See you,” Nick called after him, before turning to smile at Sergei.

He shrugged, as if to say _What can you do?_

Sergei shrugged back, then smiled. “Come to mine?”

“Sounds good,” Nick said.

They walked back to Sergei’s apartment, shoulders bumping together. It was weird how comfortable Nick felt already; to be fair, he’d shared dreams with the guy. There weren’t many things weirder than that.

Sergei lived in a second floor apartment not far from downtown, another solid, old fashioned brick and mortar building. He hadn’t had much chance to decorate, moving boxes still cluttering the living room, a couple of pillows set jauntily on the couch cushions.

There was a moment, between Sergei locking the door and flicking on the light, that seemed to stretch for hours. Nick watched, as if from far away, as Sergei stepped closer, until he was almost stood on Nick’s toes.

“Uh, hi,” he said, trying not to stare too obviously. It was overwhelming; he’d spent so long with only the vaguest impression of Sergei’s whole being that his brain was struggling to process any of the details - the soft waves in his shaggy hair, the expanse of his throat behind his open collar. He swallowed, shifting his focus back up to Sergei’s eyes. Those, at least, were familiar.

“Hi,” Sergei replied. He reached out to brush his hand against Nick’s arm, ran his thumb down to rest, perfectly, over his mark. “Can I touch?” He asked. Nick smiled at the deja vu, then moved back just slightly to shrug off his cardigan.

“Be my guest,” he said lightly.

Sergei’s fingers were gentle as he traced the mark, taking his time as he followed the looping cursive below the links. “You know,” he said, conversationally, thumb still resting on the first link in the chain. “Normally I not go out like tonight.”

“Is that so?” Nick asked. He felt strange, his shields still up but something beyond them demanding his attention.

“Mmm,” hummed Sergei, bringing his other hand up to rest on Nick’s collar. “I am not good at, ah, staying where I am. You know?”

“I think so,” said Nick. “You mean zoning out?”

Sergei grinned. “Yes, exactly this. You see it, in the dream. Is not so bad with you there, I think.”

“That does make sense,” Nick said. The demand on his attention grew a little stronger, something soft and happy stretching across the outer limits of his shield. He let out a breath and lowered it, just a little.

He felt the soft, happy feeling unfurl in his head, coating his consciousness in a layer of contentment. It was very, very weird.

Nick blinked. “Is that you?”

Sergei blushed. “I think so, yes. Sorry.”

“No big,” said Nick, with a smile. They were still stood close together, Sergei’s hand covering his mark. “Hey, so. I showed you mine.”

Sergei nodded, offering his arm. “Feel free,” he said, stepping back to make room.

As soon as Nick’s hand brushed the lettering, he felt something slot into place in his mind. “Huh,” he said, quietly. He paused, resting his thumb against the curve of Sergei’s elbow. “Huh.”

He could feel Sergei’s smile without looking, a feeling of warmth spreading out from that newly fitted puzzle piece. He grinned, looking up. “Gotta say,” he said, moving his free hand to loop around Sergei’s neck. “That felt pretty good.”

“Oh?” Sergei asked, shifting one hand from Nick’s collar to his waist. “Me too, I suppose.”

“You _suppose_?” Nick said, faux outraged. He would’ve continued, but he chose the wrong moment to take in Sergei’s expression, open and fond.

Taken over, momentarily, by the kind of sappy feeling he was hoping to get used to, Nick kissed him. Sergei kissed back, of course, kept up steady pressure even as Nick felt his shields collapse in dramatic fashion, fireworks exploding in his chest.

It should’ve been a cliche, something out of the worst Hallmark movie, but Nick was pretty such Matching lived up to all those standards and then some. He stumbled back to the couch, tripping over one of the packing boxes littered across the floor and falling into the cushions, pulling an unresisting Sergei down with him.

They didn’t really talk for the rest of the evening. There was something to be said for Matching, the feeling of being one person in two bodies, when there was a significant language barrier and slightly less significant jet lag to deal with.

Around 2am they wound up in bed, Nick propped up against the headboard, tracing Sergei’s mark with his fingertips.

“Nice to meet you, by the way,” said Nick, into the stillness of the night.

Sergei huffed a laugh against his hip. “You say nicest things.”

 

* * *

 

“Hey, Bob, you alright?” Cam sounded worried, Nick thought, even from across the rink.

Nick couldn’t usually pick up sound from that far away, but apparently Sergei had been rubbing off on him. Poor choice of words, Nick thought, but it was accurate in more than one sense, so he kept using it despite himself.

He skated over, excusing himself from his chat with Skille about the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy, and came to a stop by the net, kept himself steady with one hand on the cage.

Cam looked up. “Oh, Nick. Bobs isn’t looking too good, you wanna take him?” He jerked his thumb towards the locker room.

Nick nodded. “Probably a good idea.”

Officially speaking, the team didn’t know about him and Sergei, whichever way you looked at it, but Nick was pretty sure Cam, at least, had figured it out. And Jack knew, obviously, hadn’t been able to restrain himself when Nick came back to his apartment fifteen hours late, wearing one of Sergei’s shirts and an embarrassed grin.

It was pointless trying to deflect Jack’s completely accurate conclusions after that.

He crouched down, careful to keep his skates under him, and set one hand along the narrow line of Sergei’s neck still visible between his jersey and mask.

“Hey,” he murmured. Sergei’s eyes were locked somewhere in the middle distance, his breathing unnaturally steady. _Shit_.

“Hey,” Nick said again, keeping his voice even. “You probably can’t hear me right now, and god knows you might get sick of my voice soon enough, but we gotta get you off the ice.” He locked his other hand in Sergei’s elbow, managed to pull him upright. He nodded at Coach Richards, looked meaningfully at the tunnel. Coach, at least, definitely knew about them. That had been a really fun conversation.

It took a good few minutes to pull Sergei somewhere quieter, but Nick managed it, getting him sat up against the wall of the medical center. There was soundproofing in there, god knew why, and he wasn’t going to complain about it ever again.

He sat down next to him, stretching his legs, and took Sergei’s hand. “Now, I never got the chance to practice this for real,” he began, trying to slip into the soothing tone Mel had demonstrated, all those years ago. “But it did work in the dream, that one time, so I am taking the W on that one, which makes a 100% success rate.” He turned Sergei’s hand over in his, ran his fingers up the outside of his forearm, stroking gently back and forth. “Try and focus on that, alright? I’m really hoping you’re ticklish, that’d make this about ten times easier.” Not that six months together had revealed anything of the kind, but Nick was still holding out hope. “I don’t know what exactly set this off,” he continued, leaning in closer to Sergei’s ear. “But I’m really hoping it was something cool, and not a scratch on the ice or something.”

He kept up a steady stream of talk for a while longer, kept his hand on Sergei’s arm, their shoulders touching. Eventually, with a shaky sigh, Sergei came back to himself.

Nick slumped, thankful, and rested his forehead against Sergei’s shoulder. “Nice to have you back.”

“Nice to be back,” Sergei replied, voice scratchy. “Sad to say it was a very boring thing this time. Sound of puck hitting glass.”

“That’s definitely boring,” said Nick. “But it is loud.” He sighed. “You wanna go back out there? Practice is almost over.”

“No,” Sergei said, taking Nick’s hand between both of his own. He smiled. “I think I am okay here.”

**Author's Note:**

> the monster is published!!!! it's out there!!!!
> 
> i wrote the majority of this fic in a 24 hour timespan a few weeks ago, and have only now pulled it out and rewritten chunks of it so it flows a little better. it's unbetaed, because i'm impatient, so if there are any absolutely horrific continuity errors please let me know so i can 1) cry a bit 2) correct it posthaste.
> 
> nick really was on the usntdp team with jack for about two months, as well as phil kessel (the very phil referred to herein). i didn't manage to work in a joke about jack's hate-on for phil back in the day but know that that is very much an intended part of his characterisation.
> 
> russian translations:  
> Здравствуйте - hello (formal)  
> Kак Вас зову́т? - what are you called? [i'm pretty sure it should be a lower case B but my keyboard... hates me...]  
> Mеня зовут - my name is
> 
> title is from 'the nearness of you' as recorded by ella fitzgerald & louis armstrong
> 
> as always, find me on twitter @dotsayers or on tumblr also @dotsayers for hockey, mcelroys and occasional political commentary. hope you enjoyed this 17000 word jaunt through my id :D


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